The Usual Suspects: Ephblog Searches for the Mystery Professor Who Threatened Violence Over the Chicago Principles

WILLIAMSTOWN, MA - Although Maud appears to have got the woke student activists out of the headlines for now, I'm still very interested in uncovering the the identity of the professor who threatened violence to stop the Chicago Principles from coming to Williams College. Earlier Ephblog came up with four professors whose background seemed to fit the report we read earlier from Luana Maroja. Click on the link below for the full Ephblog article.

Admit Your Privilege, 5

The enterprising leader of Ephblog, David Dudley Field '25, is intrigued by the educational benefits of having this potentially violent mystery professor share her personal experience regarding the anti-free speech riots at UC Berkeley. He writes:

A professor threatening violence is nuts! Is anyone else shocked by this? But, at the same time, tell us your story! EphBlog loves a riot. What was the Berkeley riot like? What did you do? What lessons did you learn? Perhaps you could share those lessons with your Williams students . . .

Field '25 recommends the student journalists at the Williams Record investigate Luana Maroja's story and reveal her identity. This might happen. In my experience, Nicholas Goldrosen, the current editor-in-chief, seems eminently fair. He has treated me fairly and I admire his courage for doing so. The work should be relatively easy because Ephblog has already revealed the names of the professors who are the most plausible suspects.

Ephblog reports one useful resource is the Williams College Course Catalog (pdf) which describes faculty backgrounds. The faculty with the most recent degrees from UC Berkeley include Sarah E. Olsen (PHD 2016), Ianna Hawkins Owen (PHD 2016), Kailani Polzak (PHD 2017) and Yana Skorobogatov (PHD 2018).

After a bit of on-line research, I would probably suggest Field '25 cross Sarah E. Olsen off his list. She was teaching at Amherst (or is it amHerst?) during the two years prior to her arrival at Williams College in the Fall of 2018. I think it is safe to assume she wasn't active in the rioting which led to the cancellation of Milo Yiannopoulos’s speaking engagement on February 1, 2017.

Ianna Hawkins Owen is an Assistant Professor of English who took her PhD in African American Studies from UC Berkeley. My Google research shows she was at UC Berkeley at the time of the riots. She was enjoying a post-doctorate fellowship which ran from 2016 to 2017. She arrived at Williams College in the Fall of 2017 and is part of the same cohort which included woke faculty activists Kai Green and Kimberly Love.

Kailani Polzak was probably not at UC Berkeley in January 2017. I'm thinking this only because I found she was a C3 Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Art History at Williams College for two years starting in 2015-2016. Accordingly, it doesn't look like she was at UC Berkeley during the riots. Nevertheless, she does seem to be a woke faculty member. She has been involved in the effort to establish an Asian studies position. She is also a member of the same faculty cohort as Green, Love and Owen.

Yana Skorobogatov is a native Russia speaker with a strong interest in the Soviet Union. She is an assistant professor of history. Like Owen, it looks like she was definitely in the UC Berkeley area at the time of the riots. She seems pretty woke too. While at Berkeley she taught a courses on incarceration and global history. The only thing that would make her less likely to be the mystery professor is that she would have been in her first semester of her employment at Williams College. Specifically, she would have been publicly calling for violence within the first three months of her tenure track job.   

"Of course," Ephblog cautiously asserts, "just because this professor was at the riot does not mean that she has a degree from Berkeley, but this is the place to start." Field '25 concludes: "I also suspect that this is more likely to be a new faculty member since most already-hired Williams faculty would have been teaching during the February 2017 Milo riots."

All of this would be easily cleared up if I got a couple of phone calls from participants at the event or if Professor Luana Marojo is willing to give me the name. My number is 949-338-5921. You can email me at johndrew25@msn.com. I'm happy to protect your anonymity.

John C. Drew, Ph.D. is an award-winning political scientist and a former Williams College professor. He is an occasional contributor at American Thinker, Breitbart, Front Page, PJMedia and WND.

Hell Froze Over: Dr. Drew Gets a Respectful Call from the Williams Record Editor-In-Chief

LAGUNA NIGUEL, CA - I was surprised to receive a polite, professional phone call from Nicholas Goldrosen, the Editor-in-Chief of the Williams Record evening. He  a clarification in his paper regarding statements published about me last month.

John Drew, at home with his neighbors, in Williamstown, 

MA in 1988.

I think I would gotten to this good news more quickly, and would have been nicer to Nicholas too, if I had been certain of his identity. Initially, I hung up on him.

After years of seeing my name in print, usually for something embarrassing, I'm careful about talking to strangers on the phone. I remember I once reacted to a phone message from Dinesh D'Souza - the Indian-born American conservative political commentator, author and filmmaker - by first calling his office at Kings College in New York, NY to make sure it was really him.

When I first got a call from David Garrow asking to interview me for his biography on President Obama, I listened to YouTube videos of Garrow speaking so I might be able to verify his identity from his voice.

My goal in all of this is simply to avoid ending up like Rep. Adam Schiff who was the victim of a prank call from two Russian radio comedians. They convinced Schiff that he was talking to Ukrainian politician Andriy Parubiy and that they could send him compromising pictures of Donald Trump.

After doing a little research, I called Nicholas back. The reason for his call, as far as I can figure it out, is that I wrote a piece for Williams Liberty complaining about how I was unfairly smeared by a Williams Record reporter, Samuel Wolf.

Wolf had written a piece about a truly evil Williams College professor who had engaged in multiple sexual relationships with his female Williams College students now named David Sanford and formerly named David Weisbord. David Weisbord had been an associate professor of philosophy from 1989 to 1991. He arrived on campus after I had already resigned. Sanford was in the news mainly because he and his wife were listed as the hosts of a Biden fundraiser in Bronxville, New York.

Wolf dug up a one-sided attack on my character and intelligence which had been published in a letter to the Williams Record back in April 25, 1989. His aim was to suggest that my views at that time were a reflection of the same, creepy, permissive attitudes which foreshadowed Stanford's exploitative behavior. Ideally, Wolf should have investigated why it took the libertine, out-of-touch leadership of William College so long to prohibit the practice. Prohibitions against professors having sex with their students were not part of the employee handbook at William's College until the spring of 2018.

I can report that Nicholas was gracious enough to hear my side of the story, take down my views, and offered to publish a correction to Wolf's earlier article.

UPDATE - November 20, 2019

The Williams Record has revised an earlier article which I have complained included an unfair gratuitous smear against me. The revised article deletes the text that included me adds a statement regarding the changes made in the article. I could not be happier.

John C. Drew, Ph.D. is an award-winning political scientist and a former Williams College professor. He is an occasional contributor at American Thinker, Breitbart, Front Page, PJMedia and WND.